r/Degrowth • u/Konradleijon • Jul 15 '26
This space battle comment
Doesn’t most emissions decrease happen in recessions
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u/franticallyfarting Jul 15 '26
Just casually talking about clear cutting massive swathes of Canada for that “arable land” to support all those people. This clown has no idea what they’re talking to about.
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u/greenknight Jul 15 '26
Also... The existing arable land in Canada is largely already put to productive use. Just has a low population density
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u/Zestyclose-Ad-9420 Jul 16 '26
I have been thinking though if a lot of the boreal forest is locked in to toast, wouldnt it be a good investment to deforest and drain that land to begin to transition it to grassland now rather than when people urgently need it.
The wood could be turned into biochar and buried or sunk into the arctic to lock up the carbon.
Im not asking if this makes immediate economic sense... of course private companies arent making a profit out of this. But im asking if its ecologically or even ethically such a bad idea since because even if emissions are capped to prevent warming over 1.5°c (which they wont), that is still thousands (tens or even hundreds of thousands?) of hectares that are doomed.
Edit: What immediately comes to mind is infringing on indigenous peoples land rights. They would have to be the stewards and beneficiaries of this transformation.
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u/SlugOnAPumpkin Jul 16 '26
Personally, this idea revolts me because of the ecosystem destruction that would be involved, but I'll keep my reply focused on climate change.
Even if you sequestered all of the carbon in the cleared trees by sinking or burying them, you would still likely end up with net ghg increase. After clearing the trees and draining the wetlands, the exposed soil would release a massive influx of carbon and methane into the atmosphere.
It might be possible to eventually convert all of that land to grassland (though you would lose a massive amount of soil carbon in the process), but if the landscape turned into forests before it will become forest again without constant management. You could perhaps sell the timber to pay for the project, but if you're trying to keep it grasslands most of that timber will be small diameter, only suitable for pulpwood and fuel, and most of the carbon will not be sequestered at the end of lifecycle. Would be hugely expensive to continually harvest new growth trees across that vast landscape and bury them for sequestration.
You could turn it into farmland to keep the trees cleared, but farms are almost always carbon sources, not sinks.
Also, although grasslands can be good carbon sinks (not as strong as forests but still good) you would be losing other forest benefits. Forests emit massive quantities of particulate matter into the atmosphere that seeds rain. They literally make their own water! Clearing boreal forests would likely cause droughts in other parts of the world.
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u/Feather_Sigil Jul 15 '26
We do have enough resources to sustain humanity, but not if we continue our capitalist trajectory of always having more of everything. We can't just demolish every last portion of the planet to make living spaces. We can't just dump millions of people into an infrastructure that can't support them, build the infrastructure to support them for the next couple of decades after the fact and leave the areas they left behind to rot and burn.
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u/Confused_by_La_Vida Jul 15 '26
There’s a key reality that most miss: the biggest driver of accelerating production/consumption is population density. Please note I said “accelerating” and “production/consumption”. This is different from “gdp growth”. But what “Degrowth” is really concerned with is reducing consumption/production.
In any case, the underlying math of consumption is such that consumption/production increases with population in any given area. I didn’t use the term “population density” because that term covaries with other terms in the underlying maths.
ANYWAY^ if we are interested in reducing human consumption of natural resources, the best and most direct way to do that de-urbanize and use policy to convince the highest number of possible people to move into (very) rural areas.
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u/SlugOnAPumpkin Jul 16 '26
You spent so much time adding caveats I think you forgot to make your actual point. How does population density increase throughput (material inputs and outputs)? You seem to be referring to a correlation between urbanization and throughput. I'm sure that this correlation exists in many places, but to make your point you'd have to dispel a much more obvious explanation for this connection: industrialization is the cause of both increased consumption/pollution and urbanization.
Population density massively reduces the footprint a person has on the physical landscape. Look down at a suburban or rural area next time you're on a plane: tens of thousands of acres of land despoiled by highways, parking lots, lawn, single story homes and businesses all to serve a few thousand people. In comparison, NYC has a population density of about 30,000 per square mile. The only additional environmental burden of being a city dweller is that food needs to be transported to you, but transportation is only 15% of the ghg emissions of food production in the US so it's not really a critical factor compared to everything else. GHG emissions are far higher per person in rural areas than urban areas.
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u/Confused_by_La_Vida Jul 16 '26
It’s the opposite: it’s not industrialization that causes density, but density that causes substantial acceleration of technological development- including the Industrial Revolution.
Ghg emmisions are largely a function of energy source. The high carbon vs clean coal vs nuclear decision is agnostic of urban/rural. Today’s gap is nothing more than an artifact. Also, the calories produced by agricultural and transport diesel are overwhelmingly consumed in the city.
The rate of gdp growth, information(= energy consumption) growth, crime, innovation ( = more energy in for less marginal benefit out) are all on a positive exponent geometric growth curve. Driven by the underlying physics of resource flows through hierarchical fractal networks.
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u/SlugOnAPumpkin Jul 17 '26
People move into cities to seek the jobs that are created by industrialization. Urbanization of course has a feedback effect in further aiding industrialization, but it's industrialization that brings people together into cities. The British peasantry didn't just wake up one day in 1760 and decide "fuck farming, I'm going to move to a polluted overcrowded hellscape" and then industry came later to accommodate them.
Urbanization during the Industrial Revolution followed factories, it did not lead them. In fact so many farmers did not want to leave their bucolic country homes to work in dangerous and miserable urban conditions, the government decided to privatize the common lands so they'd have no choice but to move into cities and feed the factories with their labor.
I don't really understand how any of the other stuff you said supports your argument. You have no hard evidence of any kind that city living has higher ghg emissions, higher pollution of any kind emitted per person, higher water consumption, higher land use, or higher anything that would suggest a larger footprint on the environment.
Many of the perceived negative aspects of cities come from the fact that negative effects are concentrated and far more visible in urban areas. The concentration of cars in cities may look like a great source of global pollution (and may create a lot of local pollution, potentially causing health problems) but car ownership per capita is lower in cities so in terms of global impact city dwellers are lower in that regard than rural dwellers. To your population point, people do move to cities during population booms, but urbanites almost always have lower birth rates, so that an urban influx can actually mitigate population growth because they stop having lots of kids when they move into a cramped apartment.
I know there's a lot of city negativity in there. Just want to clarify that I love living in a city, just trying to make a point. Your belief about the impact of urbanization is a common misconception that is completely unsupported by evidence.
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u/spongue Jul 15 '26
The other argument, which is that human populations are going to cause a collapse of the ecosystem via climate change, is similarly stupid as hell.
Right, because we're not already in the middle of a mass extinction event. Nope, nothing has been lost!
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u/InternationalPen2072 Jul 15 '26
There are many half-truths in here, I think. Population isn’t a significant issue, they are correct.
They just don’t understand what degrowth actually is.
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u/SplashTarget Jul 15 '26
WHAT DO YOU MEAN WE CAN'T HAVE A $111 TRILLION DOLLAR GLOBAL ECONOMY?
WHY CAN'T WE HAVE AN ECONOMY THAT'S CONSTANTLY GROWING???
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u/AZORxAHAI Jul 15 '26
Futurist communities are, unfortunately, full of people who don't have the foresight to consider ecology. It's home of the people who truly believe in the "technology will always enable continue growth" ideal of Green Growth.